Wanted (2008)

Reviewed on 2009 September 27

Ridiculous — and I don’t mean that in a bad way at all, I enjoyed this thing — yarn about a schlub about to be yanked from his dreary existence and flung into a a fraternity of top-flight assassins working out of a textile factory. Get your bad-for-you snacks ready!

Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy) is the most downtrodden cubicle farmer since
The Apartment’s C.C. Baxter. His boss appears to be Satan with 100 extra pounds and dressed as a giant Bratz® doll, his nasty girlfriend is cheating on him with his so-called best friend, and his anxiety medicine isn’t even working. One night things come crashing to a head (I won’t ruin that for you) and he encounters a mysterious woman (Angelina Jolie) who scoops him up and takes him to the equally mysterious and even more urbane Sloan (Morgan Freeman). Sloan assures Wesley that he has a destiny to fulfill, which is big news to Wes, since he couldn’t even get his boss’s reports done to her satisfaction. He can’t parse an expense report, and he’s supposed to be some sort of ninja?

This is an entertaining, ludicrous movie that doesn’t just ignore reality, it pees on the laws of physics. And for a Saturday night flick, that’s OK. Both it and the crab rangoon and fried rice I enjoyed while watching it were junk food, and a little of that can be fun. The veering from anything that even
could
occur in nature didn’t bother me, since this didn’t pretend to be anything other than a fantasy/action adventure tale, and because Derek Haas and Michael Brandt came up with such fast-paced script.